Customer Commitments November 2023

In our last Customer Commitments blog we told you that, like many other housing associations across the country, we were dealing with a huge demand for our services. 

This has certainly continued over the last few months, and as the colder weather hits, we’re not expecting this to slow down. 

We’re doing everything we can to make sure we’re there for you when you need us, while continuing our work to improve your experience with us.  

Take a look at our new, easy-to-read Customer Commitment report below to see how we’re doing. 

Recruitment 

We totally get that call wait times can be frustrating and as you can see from the infographic below, when you call us, our speed in answering isn’t where you or Stonewater want it to be.  

As we mentioned last time, we’ve increased resources in our Customer Services Centre and between now and January next year, we have 10 additional colleagues joining the team.    

We need to train our new starters so they can deal with your queries effectively and would like to thank you for your continued patience as we work to bring down these annoying call waiting times. 

Satisfaction 

Despite the call waits, we’re delighted to see that our overall satisfaction score for our customer service centre has climbed to 85%. This gives us the assurance that while the call wait times aren’t where we want them, once you speak to one of our colleagues, you’re mostly very happy. Where customers aren’t happy, we always dig deeper to work out what we can do better.  

Similarly, our satisfaction score with our repairs service – possibly the most demanding area of our business – shows that this is also working well.  

Like every repair service, everywhere, there are currently challenges in terms of demand, labour, material and inflationary rises but we’re pleased to see that satisfaction is holding up. 

This doesn’t mean that we think everything is rosy and we don’t need to improve. We know from our complaints and other customer feedback that speed of service, and quality, remains a concern. We’re working with our contractors to reduce the number of outstanding works and improve communication. We’re also continuing to work with customers and contractors to better prioritise work in order to meet demand.  

We’ve also seen our anti-social behaviour (ASB) satisfaction scores holding above our target of 60% for the second successive quarter, which is really pleasing to see. Due to how complicated ASB can be, it can be a really difficult thing to resolve to the satisfaction of everyone.  

Where ASB is concerned, we have to work within the powers we have as a landlord and the evidence we get from customers and partners like the police, which can take time. On the occasions legal action is needed, this can also be a slow, frustrating process. We’ve worked hard to improve communication and we’ve been working with our Customer Scrutiny Panel to look at how we can better manage expectations in this area.   

We really appreciate the feedback that you have given to us in these areas, and we will keep striving for improvement. 

Other areas for improvement 

As you can see, responding to and handling your complaints has been a real challenge for us in the last few months. 

Although we’re doing well with acknowledging your complaints on time, there’s some work to do for us to meet our targets when it comes to satisfaction and our response time. We continue to review whether we have the resource levels right, and have increased visibility and accountability in this area to improve our response time and make sure we’re delivering on our commitments.  

You can find out more about our complaints service in our latest Learning from Complaints blog here. 

We’ve also seen a small drop in repair appointments being kept. Although we still attended around 30,000 repairs during this time, we’re sharing this information with all of our contractors to make sure that they understand just how stressful it can be for our customers to have appointments cancelled or not attended. 

Once again, I wanted to say a massive thank you to all of our customers who tell us about their experiences so that we can keep a close eye on our performance and make sure we’re doing what we can to improve them for you. 

Best wishes, 

Dave Lockerman, Director of Housing Operations